David Hinchliffe delivered the PIA (Qld) 2017 Keeble Lecture. His presentation, "THE ART OF PLANNING... (or, “Things are Great”)" is set out below.

BACKGROUND

David Hinchliffe has had a unique career straddling the 3 P’s — politics, planning and painting.

As a former Deputy Lord Mayor of Australia's largest urban authority, he was a member of the Council's ground-breaking Urban Renewal Committee and Chairman responsible for Planning and Economic Development from 2004-2008. He served in Civic Cabinet for 17 years and for 25 years represented 's CBD and inner city suburbs to the north.

Before his election in 1988, he was a practising artist. Since his retirement from politics, he has returned fulltime to painting. Like his politics, his subject matter is urban, focusing on painting the great cities of the world. He is represented by 12 galleries around the world and exhibits regularly in New York, London, Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo as well as Brisbane and Melbourne, with more than 90 solo exhibitions under his belt.

THE ART OF PLANNING... (or, “Things are Great”)

At the outset I want to thank Michael Leunig for his inestimable brilliance, his sardonic wickedly dark and sarcastic humour. I have borrowed from his book ‘The Essential Leunig’ to help illustrate some of the points I will make in this address and to hopefully help prevent you from falling asleep. He has also set the tone for my address... As well, I have relied on the great wealth of historical photos held by the State Library, the occasional assistance of some artistic mates — Vincent Van Gogh, Rubes and Michelangelo to name a few — and on Mr Google. If you’re not amused by the cartoons I hope you’re at least a little fascinated by the old photos and perhaps bemused by my use of the Old Masters.

What could be more dangerous than asking an opinionated politician for an opinion?... Well, I’d say there are two things more dangerous. One is to ask an opinionated EX-politician for his or her view and perhaps the second is to ask someone who is both an opinionated ex-politician AND an opinionated artist.

Serving politicians have to try to be at least occasionally diplomatic and even charming. Ex- politicians don’t. They can insult and offend at will. Ex-politicians like our friend up here can say anything they like as they’re free from the constraints of politics.

Artists on the other hand are free from the constraints of the real world. Many artists are notoriously individualistic (perhaps some would say eccentric) in their view of the world. And they are even more likely to tell you what they think...and that, of course, is the most dangerous thing of all.

In my case you've got the double whammy -- both as a highly opinionated practising artist and as a highly opinionated EX-politician.

Firstly, I want to thank you for the great honour of being asked to present the Keeble lecture. I have to admit that when I was asked by John Brannock I was a bit confused and a bit alarmed. I started reading the brilliant addresses of former Keeble lecturers and my alarm turned to panic. So, I’ve thought about all those endless meetings over a quarter of a century where I sat across the table from local planning giants like Michael Kerry, Trevor Reddacliff, Phil Heywood, John Brannock, Jeff Humphries, Peter Cumming, Terry Conway, Cassandra Sun, Wendy Chadwick and so many more and I’ve tried to distil something from their wisdom.

Let's start by examining the role of the planner and the way the real world shapes planning.

I suppose if you read the Bible and subscribe to it, you could make the case that the original town planner was God. He was clearly bored with his empty void and all that relentless infinity...and decided one day he’d make the world.

It seemed to start out quite well.

He created a beautiful park, a bit like my favourite urban park, Central Park. God didn’t design Central Park. (Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux did after they won a design competition in 1858. ) God made Eden but without a design competition, without public tenders and without public input. It all seemed to work pretty well.

There was a nice town centre which featured a prominent apple tree. (We'll come back to that in a moment…)

God didn't have a traffic problem.

Animals just grazed contentedly together. Even the lions sat down with the lambs apparently and everyone got on.

Presumably there was a lot of natural composting and so there was no need for sewerage systems. I'm sure God would have made sure there was an ideal supply or rain and freshwater so no need for water reticulation infrastructure. There were no dramatic disasters like earthquakes or global warming to contend with. There was no hard stand area (no bitumen roads no expensive brick paving and no rooves) so no need for stormwater infrastructure.

It was a strictly low budget low-profile, low-rise development.

God didn't have a density problem either. There were just two people to accommodate - Adam and Eve. And there were NO NIMBY neighbours who were worried about what Adam and Eve were getting up to on their plot.

But as we know with every perfect scenario there always has to be a snake in the grass. The serpent whispers in Eve's ear that she shouldn't be contented about her current Eco-friendly low-carbon footprint environment. (Maybe the serpent in this story is a metaphor for the land developer. ) What she really needs is an upmarket 3 storey, 6 bedroom Macmansion with media room, entertainment room all the mod cons, garage for half a dozen cars (which haven’t been invented yet) spa, pool and leaf blower... So how did it all end for Adam and Eve and the Eden Heights Estate...?

We know that God experienced what all novice town planners experience when they start practising the art and science of town planning...chronic disappointment. Even for poor old God the real world spoilt what seemed like a good idea at the time. Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden to face a life of red tape, infrastructure planning, public consultation, plot ratios, tangential rectangles, disputation with NIMBY neighbours, endless regulation, building and town planning applications...in other words Hell on Earth. Thus, ladies and gentlemen, the profession of town planning was born. And contrary to popular mythology that says prostitution is the world's oldest profession, I contend, that honour belongs to town planning. Not only that, I contend that Original Sin and Town Planning are intimately and inextricably linked!

Now why is it that when fresh-faced, bright eyed young idealistic town planners emerge from the warm cocoon of tertiary institutions into the bright glare and harsh unfair reality of the world, it's only a matter of time before they look like this... I once asked a planner what made her fellow planners so 'different'? She paused briefly and responded, "You must understand that we start our working lives wanting to change the world for the better... and then,” she said, “the reality of the world sets in." It was such a resoundingly painful observation that I've remembered it for years. It's also why I stopped encouraging my sons to pursue careers in town planning. Is it an accurate assessment or was it just one person venting spleen on a particularly bad day at the office? I suspect that like all exaggerations there is an element of truth buried in there.

I say at the outset I am not now nor have I ever been a town planner. I have never studied town planning, I've spoken on many occasions to town planning students and I am prepared to admit here publicly I have friends who are known to be town planners. (They’re such nice people I overlook their background). (I like to think of this as Leunig’s depiction of me on the right with a group of my town planning friends) I haven't noticed a particularly gloomy and depressed attitude among them. In fact, they generally seem a pretty buoyant and happy lot. Maybe that's because they've reconciled themselves to the ways of the world. Perhaps they no longer believe that the world can be so easily fixed. Maybe they've made their peace with the world. I’m not sure...

But I want to share a secret. Planners are not alone. Lawyers, teachers, doctors, journalists in fact just about all the professions start from the principle that they'd like to make the world a better place. Then reality hits.

Believe it or not, even most politicians start their political careers wanting to make the world a better place...

Successful town planners are those who blend reality with theory, who are determined to get good outcomes, but flexible enough to know that planning involves compromise. Planners have to deal with the demands of the political process, the demands of the wider community, the demands of economic reality, the demands of development and growth and industry. It is one of the most demanding of professions. And fundamentally planners, unlike most other professions, rely on others to achieve the desired outcome. You have to have politicians on side in order to codify the planning strategies and regulations. You generally have to have the public on side before you even get the consent of the politicians. You have to have the politicians lined up too if you're going to get the massive financial commitments you need to allocate funds for transport, water, sewerage and social infrastructure. You have to have the development community (both developers and their clients and their investors) on side in order to have your planning dream become a development reality.

Town planning can feel like moving mountains — and sometimes it is literally as well as figuratively. Words on paper and lines on maps don't do it, without all these other players falling into line. It's rarely a neat line. It's never a clean and easy process getting there. Sometimes, it just feels way too hard, way too awful, to bother persevering. But what history tells us is this: an unplanned community is a POTENTIAL catastrophe You and I would not want belong to a community where the only thing that prevailed was the influence of market forces or the power of money or the naked power of ego and ambition.

I'd like to examine just a couple of examples of town planning principles to see how these forces -- the political, the public, the developer and the economic forces -- impact on how those principles are (or are not) put into effect.

Let's take traffic, transport and parking. A well-established town planning principle is that good functional cities have an abundance of mass transit. It is also a good environmental principle in a world confronting the reality of global warming. We all know that in the 20th century the car was King, but we also know that in the 21st century it’s become the Devil. We have to find better ways of moving more people more efficiently and using fewer finite resources. There are few people who disagree with that principle.

I remember at quarterly public meetings which the Soorley administration initiated to talk about local issues in the suburbs, if you asked the question, "Do you want better public transport?" Just about every hand would shoot up. Even people who never used buses or ferries or trains wanted better public transport if only to get more motorists off the roads, so they could drive themselves to work in their cars more quickly. At the same time if you asked the question, "Who wants better roads to drive on?" an almost equal number of hands would go up. It'd be a brave and perhaps foolhardy politician who would dare point out that there was potentially an inherent contradiction in wanting both better public transport and better roads to drive your private cars.

Better public transport involves huge injections of public subsidy. Likewise, better roads with less congestion, involves massive public spending. Unless you're in some oil-rich potentate, there's just not enough cold hard cash to go around. Money directed to one inevitably means less for the other. In economic terms it's an opportunity cost. If you spend on one, there's less opportunity to spend on the other. Of course, it's up to the politicians to find the funding and it almost always comes back to you and me and the public to pay for it.

But it's essentially up to the planners to take the principle of improving public transport usage and put it into practice. They consult the transport planners about the desirable network. They map out the strategic plan. With the agreement of politicians, they codify contributions to public transport infrastructure through the development process so not all the onus of public transport expenditure falls directly to the public.

So far, we've looked at the 'carrot' part of the public transport planning process. Now comes the stick. It is one of the harsh realities of this cruel world that if you favour one thing you must penalise another. Planners believe that to favour public transport we must penalise private transport. There are good philosophical and empirical grounds for this. Penalising is done largely by restricting onsite parking in developments. The closer a development is to a public transport node, the tougher the restrictions. It reaches a point where in some developments either in the CBD or directly above train stations, zero parking is provided. Hence, we have Transit Oriented Development.

Here is where the real world potentially collides with planning idealism. There’s one underlying problem with that Planning policy...people generally hate it. And you know who they complain to —the politicians they elected to represent them.

Since 1991, Brisbane has actively favoured and encouraged accelerated urban renewal and re- population of the inner city. (At this point like some audience participation... In 1991 when the Soorley Council came to Office and we introduced a programme of urban renewal, there were 60,000 people living within 5km of the GPO. How many do you think we’re living within that same area just 50 years before...?)

Everyone in the 50s wanted a backyard. The process of suburbanisation which afflicted the post WW2 developed world reached probably its apotheosis in the 1980s. Globally town planners acknowledged that suburban sprawl had created the "donut effect" where growth occurred at the outer edges leaving a hole in the middle...the donut.

Interesting fact: despite 30 years of renewal which certainly did arrest that population decline, I'm pretty sure the inner city has not yet reached the same population carrying capacity it had 60 years ago.) So, Urban Renewal was about dumping the donut effect. It was about filling in the hole towards the centre, with more people living more sustainably. The idealism of the urban renewalists said “public transport good, private transport bad”…and it led to the policy of tightening down on parking.

As a Councillor representing the city centre and inner city, this presented a real challenge. You discover very early in your career as a politician that people are human...startling isn't it. Within days of low-parking or even no parking developments becoming occupied, I would start receiving phone calls from people who'd just moved in wanting to know why there weren't more car parks in their building or in their street. Not only that but of course I received complaints from neighbours to these developments complaining about parking. Streets would be pried out. People would park anywhere...and any way.

The neighbours were right. Streets became more congested.

In the 50s when there were more people living in smaller and fewer homes and of course there were a lot fewer vehicles. I have my own personal description for this: the Bogdanovich phenomenon. The Bogdanovich family lived in a street in New Farm in the 60s when I was a student at New Farm State School. They had a 2 bedroom workers cottage with enclosed verandah with mum and dad and about 4 kids from memory. No car. We played in the dirt under the house. And of course we all walked or rode bikes to school. Fast forward to the year 2000, that little house was extended to twice the footprint and the whole of the area under the house was enclosed. The new occupants were a couple each with their own car. That house went from accommodating 6 people with no car to becoming 4 times the floor area and accommodating just 2 people with 2 cars, both of which were usually left out on the street. That is what I call the Bogdanovich Phenomenon. It’s the sort of inconvenient truth that makes dealing with the real world so damned messy.

Planners want to create a better world. A world where public transport is king ...... and NOT the car. The planning carrot is more spending on public transport. No one has an issue with that — so long as politicians can find the very big bucks. But the planning stick is that onsite car parking is penalised, resulting in on street parking congestion. Believe me, a lot of people (many of them very well educated and very vocal people) have a real problem with seeing that ideal of favouring public transport translated into a policy which causes their streets to be totally parked out. You can sit them down and ask if them if they agree that having more cars in developments in the inner city will lead to more traffic congestion and gridlock...and of course they see that. But the thing you learn in politics is that self-interest is the strongest motivator — and self-interest can blind you to the greater good. In public life, if you don't learn that, you don't stay around long. If you push too hard for this ideal in the face of that reality, it becomes a political issue in your community, you get defeated and the person who replaces you invariably has learned the lesson of your demise and will make it much harder for planners to wield that parking stick in their patch in the future.

So this creates an interesting dynamic between the representative of those people and the planners. This tension is replicated in a number of policy areas -- building densities, building heights, proximity to boundaries etc.

Let's look just at building heights. 60 years ago the tallest building in Brisbane was City Hall. I can hear people thinking...”surely he’s not suggesting we reduce the level of the city to 5 storeys?!” No. Of course I’m not. But you know, cities like Paris and Barcelona and Prague are all cities which at their centre are no more than around the height of our City Hall. The centre of those cities are old, sure. But most of their commercial and residential buildings were only built in in the 19th century, around the time we were starting to build Brisbane. With a bit more foresight we could have kept more of our original and distinctive character.

Let’s take a closer look at old Brisbane. I have to admit to being a bit of a nostalgist. Brisbane was an elegant verandah-ed sub-tropical colonial outpost. Sure it was a big country town, but our mix of neo-classical, Victorian and Georgian.combined with that quirky tropical verandah (which I think may have come originally from colonial India) and the big footpath awnings that protected people from the sudden tropical downpours and the relentless sunshine made for a truly unique, distinctive character.

As an artist who specialises in painting the character of cities around the world like New York or London or Paris, I lament the loss of our special character. Of course we’re fortunate that enough of our city survived that we can still be proud of places like MacArthur Chambers, the GPO and Manor Apartments and of course Customs House. But at the same time, our streets bear too many scars of tasteless development which replaced those truly distinctive buildings like the Bellevue hotel opposite Parliament. Some of us were even arrested over battles like the one to save the Bellevue and led campaigns to stop redevelopment of places like the whole of Post Office precinct.

Is there anyone here who has been to Paris or Prague or Barcelona and who believes those cities would be better off if they had bulldozed their character buildings in the 50s 60s 70s and 80s as we did? I don’t want to resurrect the Prince Charles-vs-Modern Architecture debate. I don’t suggest buildings built in 2017 should like they were built in 1917. But I do think it’d be better for our city if we kept an artistic eye on the big picture of our streetscapes. I do wish we’d made even an attempt at maintaining a modern version of verandahs and connected footpath awnings. I do think it’d be better for our city if architects and developers, instead of designing buildings which tried to outdo or devour each other, instead tried to complement each other. We should be building streetscapes not just individual buildings.

Much of what I say will be regarded as just more silliness. Perhaps it will be regarded as an ex- pollie’s pining for some romantic past. It may trigger some responses which I’ve observed between politicians and planners in my 25 years in politics. Planners occasionally see politicians as spineless venal egomaniacs and on occasions politicians see planners as self-righteous and pedantic....and that’s just on the good days! This leads me to the subject of our political system. If it weren’t so important and so true, this cartoon would simply be funny. Our system is broken. We don’t have long term thinking. We don’t see long term policy. We don’t see bravery. We don’t see cooperation. Our system is fundamentally chronically, dangerously —but not irrevocably — broken. In short, it’s screwed. I say that as someone who was part of that screwed up system for 25 years. Why am I talking about politics in a planning address? I believe planners have a professional, vested and moral interest in helping fix our broken political system.

The Westminster system is adversarial. It’s not about achieving consensus. It’s not about promoting cooperation. It’s about winner-takes-all. If I were to establish a business tomorrow and set up a board and draw a line down the centre of the boardroom table and say to directors on one side, “you’re in complete charge” and to those on another “you guys have no say and your job is to oppose everything the other guys say and do”...how long do you think that business would work? Yet, that is essentially the way the biggest business in our nation is run — the business of governing Australia and our States. It’s called the Westminster system after the palace at Westminster that is about 1000 years old. Do these people look happy? Do they look like they’re ready to work together for the greater good...? Let’s face it, the Parliamentary system as we’ve inherited it, is hopelessly out of date. That zero sum, winner-takes-all game just doesn’t cut it in the 21st century. . Not only does it not get the very best out of our elected representatives, it drives politicians and politics into the gutter. It gets the very worst out of people.

I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but we’ve just had an election. Am I happy Labor has won? Sure. Am I happy that One Nation has failed miserably? You bet. But does anyone think that the vote on Saturday is the beginning and end of our democracy? The trouble is under our system it is. We’ve voted and as Leunig suggests our votes generate about as much power as needed to turn on the lightbulb in the men’s toilet at Parliament House. The fact is we’ve elected another dysfunctional parliament. It’s not dysfunctional just because of the personalities of who might have been elected or because of the tightness of numbers. It’s dysfunctional because it’s the same old Westminster system.

Am I suggesting someone torches the Parliament as happened in Westminster in 1834? Even though it might delight the public now as much as it did the English citizenry back in 1834 who cheered when the roof fell in, NO I am not suggesting that. We can still have a Parliament and we can have real democracy inside it as well as outside of it if we commit to changing the system. Even if Anastacia wins a majority does that guarantee we’ll have long term strategic planning, long term decisions, evidence-based policy development...bravery ? No. Because it’s not just the bums on seats that guarantees functional Democracy. If it was about bums, the Campbell Newman’s government would have been the most function democracy in the history of our State.

The fact is we’re still saddled with the old Westminster parliamentary system. The warring tribes will still sit together in the Parliament brooding and belching in their trenches and hurling abuse at each other in a way that would not be tolerated in school children. We will still call the minority party the Opposition giving them a name that entitles and emboldens them to oppose. It’s in their job description after all. The majority party will still deny roughly half the parliament access to the most important information on which to base decisions. The mainstream media will still treat it as a gladiatorial personality contest and probe 24 hours a day 7 day’s a week for the slightest falter. A considered change of mind will still be derided in the media as a “backflip”. In reality we need MORE politicians prepared to change their mind — as long as it’s for the right reasons.

And let us not forget WE the people. We are not blameless in this. We will still make unrealistic demands of government to come up with simple solutions to complex problems without increasing our taxes.

I belong to a non-partisan independent think tank called newDemocracy. We believe there are better ways of doing democracy. Who are “we” and why should you be even remotely interested...? Well, newDemocracy has a range of people including former politicians from across the Great Divide of politics —. Ex-Labor politicians like Maxine McKew, Geoff Gallup and myself and ex-Liberals like Nick Greiner and Fred Chaney, and it might surprise you to learn, Campbell Newman. It also includes heavy hitters in the business community, the not-for-profit sector, the public service and academia.

Why should this interest or concern you?

Well, change has to start somewhere. And if there is no change we will see public trust further erode the system. It will be harder to get long term strategic planning done. It will be harder to get politicians to be more brave. It will be harder to get the revenue we need to do the things that need desperately to be done. ...and importantly YOUR job as planners gets that much harder. That’s why better politics, makes for better planning.

NewDemocracy has recently held two symposiums in Melbourne and . We have proposed the establishment of an independent non-partisan Commission to restore trust in the Australian democracy and to promote long term decision-making. We have private funding of $5m to start the process. An independent non-partisan Trust Commission, once established, would examine: Electoral reform including fixed terms and specific dates in which elections are held; Dramatic changes to campaign donations and campaign expenditure; Reform of the Parliamentary process to create a more inclusive cooperative and civil deliberative process; and Reform of policy development to ensure evidence-based decision-making.

A Trust Commission would then present and advocate for a road map for change to all parties and independents in all parliaments and Councils throughout Australia. It would also mobilise the Australian community through social media not simply to oppose things but to advocate for real change. Change in our institutions, possibly even constitutional change, change in our behaviour and change in our thinking. Simple really isn’t it. We realise the enormity of the challenge. We can only do that if we have good men and women from all parties, all walks of life and all sectors of the community supporting a process for positive change, instead of splintered angry groups negatively agitating in their own little bunkers. Old, partisan trench warfare is not going to reform the system.

We have to get out of the trenches. Now I can hear you thinking, “that’ll never happen”.

Well something just like that happened 200m down the road at City Hall for 4 years between 2004-2008. In 2004 Campbell Newman was elected a Liberal Lord Mayor, but Labor Councillors held the majority. I was elected their leader and immediately produced a statement of intent, setting out the ways we would bind our wounds, settle our differences and get on and work together. We included Liberal and Labor in our cabinet. We shared all high level documents from our public service. We joined to develop a 2020 strategic plan for Brisbane which continues to this day. We re-wrote the City Plan for the CBD. We agreed that no development application that came to Council would proceed unless it had joint support. I described it at the time as “government in a goldfish bowl”. We passed 4 Newman multi billion dollar budgets and of course we expanded the bus fleet and we let multi billion dollar contracts to build tunnels. Pundits said this unlikely Odd Couple, this Coalition of the Unwilling wouldn’t last 4 days. Some in the media desperately hoped it would crash and burn. It lasted 4 years. And at the end of it, Campbell Newman was so damned popular that he decided he’d like to be Premier with his own team in Queensland Parliament. He got what he wished for —. the largest majority in Queensland history...and of course you know how the story ended.

And after all that ended, he nominated me to do his official portrait for Parliament earlier this year. It may surprise you again to know that at the Sydney Symposium last week Campbell Newman addressed participants by saying he and his government had been part of the problem that has led to such a fundamental breakdown in trust. I have been part of that broken system too. I’ve seen from inside how broken it is and I’m determined to join with Campbell and others to help fix it. Change will only happen if all parties come to the table and it will only happen when they see the wisdom of that change and that change is ineluctable — against which it is vain to struggle.

Much of what I’ve said in this address has been negative. I did warn you in the beginning. It’s dangerous to invite an ex-politician and an artist to tell you what he thinks. But I want to end with a more optimistic note.

While I believe big mistakes have been made (in planning and in politics), we must do better and we can do better. I have not lost hope. I hope neither have you.